1. Field
The present disclosure relates to GUI object queries. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to automatically generating GUI object-addressing queries.
2. Related Art
As the demand for high-quality software increases, software testing plays an increasingly critical role in the software industry. In order to test the graphical user interface (GUI) of a software application, a tester usually has to manually repeat actions on the GUI. This process can be tedious and costly. Ever since the automated GUI testing tool was introduced, time and effort spent on software testing have been greatly reduced. However, one of the key barriers for large-scale deployment of automated GUI testing tools is how to identify GUI objects quickly and correctly.
In order for a computer to automatically test GUIs of software applications, a human tester's actions are usually recorded first and later replayed by the computer. The foundation of automatic GUI testing lies in identifying the GUI objects on which the tester performs actions at the recording time. The objects to be identified are recorded so that at the replay time, these objects can be identified and tester's actions are simulated.
Traditional testing tools usually define an embedded set of rules for generating addressing queries to identify GUI objects in an application under test. However, a single rule definition cannot deal with various applications. The embedded rule set is also hard to modify since it is hard-coded in the tools. Testers often have to manually construct queries specific to an application in order to identify different GUI objects in different application contexts.